Christmas Review: A bloody tale / Review of 'Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection' by Colin Wilson

Written in Blood is a weighty tome and might have been much heavier.
Colin Wilson tells us in the introduction that a really comprehensive history
of crime detection would be 10 000 pages long. At 512 pages, the wrists
are inclined to droop, but we can reassure ourselves that we are getting
away fairly lightly.

Wilson is a formidable reader himself. His bibliography iscomprehensive.
Obviously, he ploughs through books at a considerable, possibly unmatchable,
rate. He read one of these books – Stuart Kind’s The Scientific Investigation
of Crime, 420 pages long – at a single sitting, which shows the kind of
stamina he has.

He is also a prolific writer, producing 60 titles in 35 years. I imagine
that he must be reading or writing most of the time. Several of his books
concern murder in one form or another; they include Encyclopaedia of Murder
(1962), A Casebook of Murder (1979), A Psychology of Murder (1982) and Encyclopaedia
of Modern Murder (1983).

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Diligent researcher that he is, you might think that he has, as a result
of his endeavours, some fearful shadows in the mind as well, perhaps, as
an understandable predilection to regard his fellow-beings with unvarying
suspicion. He is aware that people might think that his absorption indicates
a certain morbidity and defends himself against such a charge.

He quotes a comment byanother writer, with whom he agrees, that we are
all in the position of the criminal. So he maintains that the study of crime
is as important as the study of philosophy or religion.

Wilson’s theory of criminality is that life’s frustrations oppress us
all, and that in the depths we allow the will to collapse. This collapse
of the will he sees as being responsible for self-pity, temper, and a general
sense of non-freedom in all of us. In the criminal, the result is more extreme:
crime is a short-cut from the ‘vicious circle of boredom and loss of motivation’,
the loss of a sense of personal value. Whether we are criminals orjust normal
people feelingbenighted, in these periods of dejection we are prone to take
a decision to be out of control.

It was an out-of-controldecision, Wilson explains, which led Arthur
Koestler to join the Communist Party. A night on the tiles had effected
his mental state. He had lost his money at poker, gone to bed with a woman
he disliked, and woke up beside her with, as Koestler himself wrote, the
‘urge to do something desperate’. I understand how he might have felt. We
can see, says Wilson, that his misfortunes had induced a sense of ‘non-freedom’
that led him to renounce such freedom he had left and take refuge in a crowd:
‘the basic mechanism of conversion’.

What Wilson doesn’t make clear is why one man’s option is for the Communist
Party and another’s is for murder but, dismissive of social theories of
crime, he is adamant that our unawareness of this priceless possession of
free will is what it is all about.

These theoretical flights, interesting though they are, are not, of
course, fundamental to this book. Wilson tells, with many murderous digressions,
of the development of the forensic skills. These, he appears to think, have
given the law an edge over the criminal at least in some areas. They do
not seem to have reduced the incidences of crime.

Awareness of the technical prowess of people such as the legendary Sir
Bernard Spilsbury, whose quiet certainty apparently cowed judges and juries
(fortunately, he seems to have been right) did, says Wilson, make criminals
more careful. Public knowledge of forensic achievement may still have such
an effect while not, obviously, preventing the killing.

Developments in serology,genetic fingerprinting and ballistics have
continued apace this century. Wilson traces them in gory detail. I feel
that he might perhaps have reduced the number of illustrative cases without
losing his thread. As it is, the scientific curiosity of many may be thwarted
by the inadequacy of their stomachs.

This is not a book that could be read, by most of us at any rate, at
a single sitting, but it will have earned its place in many another bibliography.
We must hope that none of its readers will come to it with criminal inclination
and a collapsed will.